VANCOUVER — Even as a report is delayed yet again into the
actions of police around serial killer Robert Pickton, there are
high expectations from advocates and activists in Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside that the report will have life-saving
solutions.

The province has granted an extra month to the commissioner who
oversaw the public inquiry into the Robert Pickton serial murder
case to hand in his final report.

"Members of the community who could have played a critical role
in the inquiry process were not able to participate. That needs
to be healed," said Esther Shannon, with the Honouring Truth sex
workers' organizing group.

"If there's no effective way of integrating the community, the
recommendations have a very high mountain to climb."

Shannon and a couple dozen people participated in a public
reading Thursday aimed at highlighting the sexism and racism
they believe was part of the problem that allowed Pickton to
continue killing women for so long.

About 30 people, including advocates and friends of the serial
killer's victims, took turns reading from a 102-page assessment
written by the lawyer appointed to broadly represent the
interests of the Downtown Eastside during the inquiry.

Some 13 groups, including those representing aboriginal concerns
and civil liberties, withdrew from the inquiry before it began
to protest the province's denial of legal funding for them at
the inquiry.

The report by lawyer Jason Gratl offers its own analysis of why
Pickton was able to hunt women in the gritty Vancouver
neighbourhood for so long, and puts forward 37 recommendations
of its own.

Oppal's task was to examine why police failed to catch Pickton
as he murdered sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in
the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The former B.C. Appeal Court judge held 94 days of formal
hearings to gather evidence, and also collected written
submissions and information at public forums throughout the
province.

The government says it has spent $8.6 million on the
commission's work to date.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind to sit through that
entire inquiry and not write good recommendations out of it,"
said Kerry Porth, a former sex worker who attended much of the
inquiry and helped organize the event.

"I'm really hopeful."

When the inquiry was first announced in 2010, Oppal was given
until the end of 2011 to finish his work, but that was extended
to June 30 of this year and then again to Oct. 31.

Justice Minister Shirley Bond signed an order in council this
week that gives Oppal yet another extension until Nov. 30.

"The public release date of the report will be determined in
consultation with the commission, taking into consideration the
information and privacy review and the time needed to print the
report," said a release from the government.

Porth said she was disappointed the report has yet again been
delayed, but said she'd prefer the necessary time be taken to
craft recommendations that could lead to "serious change."

"But a report is just a report and it could end up on a shelf
gathering dust," she added. "We will continue to push the
provincial government to implement those recommendations when
they come out."

Porth said she would like to see recommendations such as police
officers training on issues faced by aboriginal women, that the
missing person's intake process by reformed and that there be
compensation for the children of the murdered women.

Shannon said there's desire for the report to offer a funding
model for sex-worker outreach groups, and for the report to be
structured in such a way that it can be regularly revisited. The
goal would be to easily tell what actions have been taken.

Gratl said his top recommendation would be for a "discrimination
audit" to be conducted within both the Vancouver Police
Department and B.C. RCMP forces.

"Usually auditors have close access to the institution, the type
of access the commissioner didn't necessarily take advantage of,
entirely," Gratl said.

"All we saw was a tiny time slice from 1998 to 2002 of
discrimination in respect of a specific investigation. What we
didn't see was a much broader overview."

Gratl said such an audit would look at how resource allocation
decisions are made, how many officers are devoted to the safety
of sex workers and drug users, and also how many officers are
devoted to incarcerating such individual.

The inquiry heard that Vancouver police and the RCMP received
evidence implicating Pickton in the disappearances of sex
workers several years before his arrest.

Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, but
the remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm. He told
an undercover police officer he killed a total of 49.

Bond has said she will be drawing heavily on Oppal's report when
her government releases the second phase of a plan to reform the
province's justice system, due some time early next year.